“Are you losing your mind?”

“I kind of am.” Elle’s brain reeled. She had a thousand thoughts all at once. She knew how to finish the book. She’d had the ending in mind for weeks. But everything she’d written was a mess, all handwritten notebook pages. She needed to type the entire book up now. Not on a typewriter. She needed a computer. And a telephone. She had access to neither of them here. It might be 2004 out there in the real world, but the entire convent was stuck in 1904. Mother Prioress had a computer but there was no way Elle could use it to type her novel.

“My kingdom for a laptop,” Elle said.

“What are you going to do, Elle?” Kyrie asked.

“If I pursue this...”

“I know,” Kyrie said. If Elle pursued this, she couldn’t do it from the abbey. She would have to leave.

“You could have gotten into a lot of trouble doing this,” Elle said. “Breaking into Mother Prioress’s office—”

“She doesn’t keep it locked. I snuck in.”

“You snuck in to make photocopies of an erotic story written by the woman you’re sleeping with.”

“We weren’t sleeping together at the time,” Kyrie reminded her.

“Why did you do this for me?”

“I’d do anything for you. You know that.”

“Would you leave with me?” Elle asked.

“Leave the abbey with you?”

“I won’t go unless you go with me,” Elle said, meaning it.

“Where would we go?”

“I don’t know.”

“What would we do for money?”

“I don’t know.” Elle was quickly running out of the cash she’d had with her.

“Where would we stay?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t walk through that door without you.”

“Okay then,” Kyrie said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay. If you can’t leave without me, then I’ll go with you.”

“You’re serious,” Elle said, not quite believing her.

“I am. Now how many points do I get for getting my sister’s agent interested in your book?”

Elle shook her head. “I don’t know. Infinity points.” She pressed the letter to her chest.

“Then I win,” Kyrie said. “You have to tell me why you left him.”

The joy went out of the room.

“Why do you want to know?” Elle asked as she folded the letter up and slipped it back in the envelope. She would keep this letter all her life.

“Because it’s the one thing you won’t tell me. And if I’m leaving here with you, I want to know the truth about why you’re here. I want to know the truth about you. All of it. If I can walk out of this place—this place that’s my home now—then the least you can do is tell me the truth about you and him.”

“It’s not important.”

“If it wasn’t important you would have told me already.”

“Fine. It is important but it doesn’t matter to us.”

“It matters to me. It matters that you’re keeping something life-altering from me. If I’m leaving my life because of you, you have to tell me why you left your life because of him. If we’re going to be together, we can’t keep secrets from each other.”

Elle took a long heavy breath and looked away from Kyrie. At the front of the oratory near the ceiling was an octagon-shaped clear window. The moon shone through the window. A moon like a Cheshire cat’s smile. Wonderland was out there, outside the door.

But there were Jabberwockys out in Wonderland. Kyrie was right. If she was to leave the safety of the abbey behind, she needed to know what was out there.

“Fine. You want to know why I left him. This is why.”

She picked up her little makeshift cane and broke it into three pieces. She dropped the three pieces in front of Kyrie on the blanket.

“He broke something?” Kyrie asked.

“Yes,” Elle said, staring at the broken twigs of nothing on the ground.

“He broke a cane?”

“No,” Elle said. “He broke me.”

29

SØREN WAS COMING home and Elle wanted to be there when he arrived. Someone from Kingsley’s entourage would pick him up at the airport in the Rolls, as usual, and drive him to the rectory in Wakefield. Kingsley himself might go and meet him. She’d asked him not to. She wanted to be the one to tell Søren what had happened while he was gone. But she never knew with Kingsley whose side he would take. Sometimes hers. Sometimes Søren’s.

More often than not Kingsley took Kingsley’s side.

She borrowed Kingsley’s BMW and drove it to Søren’s. A few times she had to stop, pull over and throw up on the side of the road. Lucky for the road it had started to rain.

When she arrived at last, she was light-headed with dehydration and exhaustion. The overnight bag she had over her shoulder felt like a lead weight she could scarcely carry. She dragged herself up the single set of stairs in Søren’s rectory, smiling with a tiredness that bordered on delirium. Her first night with Søren he’d carried her up these stairs. She’d kill for someone to carry her now.

Elle went to the bedroom first and unlocked the box that contained her collar. She didn’t put it on. She just wanted it. For five minutes she lay on his bed before rushing to the bathroom to throw up again. Afterward she stretched out on the floor. It felt oddly comforting, lying there with the cool clean tile pressing against her burning skin. She breathed through her nose, which helped alleviate some of her nausea. The cramps came and went and she ignored them when she could, accepted them when she couldn’t. And when at last she was cool enough and comfortable enough to almost fall asleep, she heard footsteps on the stairs.